Music

The Who’s Substitute (1966)

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London in the Sixties was, famously, “swinging”, with much of the music and fashion influenced by the Mod subculture. Mods had their roots in the London of the late Fifties where a small group of fashionable young guns came to be known as modernists because of their penchant for modern jazz. By the Sixties, the movement had become the dominant, and now pluralist, cultural force of the times, had broadened its horizons, and had accumulated certain identifying symbols such as the tailored suit, the Parka, and the motor scooter. Mod music, meanwhile, had become a diverse mix of soul, R&B, ska, and blues-rooted British rock.

The early sixties had seen a clash of this new culture with the so-called “rockers”, a rival subculture centred on motorcycling, leather and 1950s rock and roll, which led to the infamous South Coast brawls of “mods and rockers”, and the ensuing “moral panic” of the Establishment. But by the mid-sixties, British rock bands, such as the Small Faces and the Who, were adopting mod fashion and attitude.

This week, I give you a sublime dose of mod sound in the form of the Who’s Substitute. Natty threads, swanky attitude, and above all a killer song from the band’s one true songwriter, guitarist Pete Townshend. Townshend wrote the song having being inspired by a line in Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of my Tears: “Although she may be cute, She’s just a substitute”.

The song has a great bassline, amply supplied by John Entwhistle and assisted on drums by amiable loon Keith Moon, guitar chops courtesy of Townshend and a suitably louche vocal from Roger Daltrey. The lyrics are cleverly wrought, though it’s no surprise that the line “I look all white but my dad was black” was altered for the more racially sensitive American market (to “I try walking forward but my feet walk back”, which was presumably thrown together at the last minute to cries of “yeah, that’ll do”).

Whatever, the finished product is a great example of stylish mod sound from the original “cool Britannia”…enjoy!

You think we look pretty good together
You think my shoes are made of leather

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just back-dated, yeah

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine-looking suit is really made out of sack

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south
And now you dare to look me in the eye
Those crocodile tears are what you cry
It’s a genuine problem, you won’t try
To work it out at all you just pass it by, pass it by

Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just backdated, yeah

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south
And now you dare to look me in the eye
Those crocodile tears are what you cry
It’s a genuine problem, you won’t try
To work it out at all you just pass it by, pass it by

Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine-looking suit is really made out of sack

The Who in 1966

Art

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942)

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If I ever get to Chicago, one of the first things on my list will be to see the iconic masterpiece of American art that is Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas, Nighthawks, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has been there ever since the Institute bought the piece from the artist, for the sum of $3000, just a few months after its completion in 1942.

The picture shows a late-night, sparsely populated downtown diner, somewhere in New York. Many people have speculated and tried to work out where the diner actually was but it is far more likely to be a composite of various joints from around the artist’s home patch of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, cobbled together in Hopper’s imagination.

Hopper and his wife Jo kept meticulous notes about his work, and they provide a rare glimpse into this oft-unconsidered aspect of the artist’s life: the planning and thought behind a planned work. This excerpt, in Jo’s handwriting, describes Nighthawks:

“Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 across canvas–at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right.

Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back–at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark–Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street–at edge of stretch of top of window”

The picture was clearly not thrown together, and indeed for all this attention to detail, the finished artwork adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It exudes a sense of loneliness, of separation, of eery silence and thus disquiet. Who are these people? What stories of quiet desperation (since we somehow suspect that the protagonists are not of a happy and stable disposition) have brought them to this late-night rendezvous? Nighthawks allows the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

 

Edward Hopper 1941
Music

Hubert Parry and John Leaf Whittier’s Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (1888)

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Are hymns capable of being a sublime art-form? Or does the Devil have the best tunes? Well, certainly, we might dismiss the archetype of the modern folk-derived “worship song”, feebly crooned to the accompaniment of a strummed guitar, but how about the contents of the classic Hymns Ancient & Modern from the heyday of Victorian hymnody?

Many of these paeans come across to modern ears as somewhat plodding and, peppered as they so often are with that staunchly God-fearing lyricism laid down by the likes of Charles Wesley, strictly for die-hard Methodists.

However, most people tend to connect with at least one hymn from their youth that stirs their spirit, be it Abide With Me, I Vow To Thee My Country, or that other hardy perennial, Amazing Grace. One such hymn that I contend is capable of sublime heights is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, the wonderful marriage of Hubert Parry’s 1888 music written for Repton School in Derbyshire and words taken from John Leaf Whittier’s 1872 poem, The Brewing of Soma.

The title of that poem may appear odd; the “soma” of the title was a sacred drink in the Vedic religion with hallucinogenic properties and which was used by devotees in an attempt to experience divinity (cf. the “ideal pleasure drug”, soma, of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). Whittier’s point is that one doesn’t need an external agent to experience divinity; all one needs is to listen to the “small, still voice” inside and to live the sober, selfless lives as practised by the Quakers to whom he was aligned.

Be that as it may, it’s when words and music combine in the hands (or throats) of a decent choir that the music comes alive. Joe Wright’s film, Atonement, has an acclaimed five-minute tracking shot depicting war-torn Dunkirk during which we begin to hear a choir of soldiers, in a battered bandstand, singing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. An effective and ironic poignancy arises from the juxtaposition of the bleak and desperate scene with the rousing majesty of the hymn.

In that spirit I present a lovely version of the hymn, sung excellently by the choir of the Abbey School, Tewkesbury, set, in similar juxtaposition, to footage from the Great War.

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways;
reclothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence, praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard,
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word,
rise up and follow thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee,
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

Art

Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

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Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb of 1432, better known as the Ghent Altarpiece, ranks among the most significant works of art in Europe. Housed at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, this large and complex altarpiece has suffered a varied history over the centuries, having been dismantled, stolen, damaged, reassembled, recovered, cleaned, and restored several times over. Thank goodness that it is currently in good and safe condition, and open for viewing by the public, at St Bavo’s.

I stumbled across this great work of art on a TV programme just days before I was due to take a weekend break in Brussels. It seemed too serendipitous not to arrange the short side-trip to Ghent, and thus I have been fortunate to view this piece up close and personal.

The van Eyck brothers, and Jan in particular, were significant artists of the Northern Renaissance, operating out of Bruges and leaving to posterity such varied works as the Arnolfini portrait, the illuminated manuscript known as the Turin-Milan Hours, and this great altarpiece in Ghent.

Jan van Eyck, the younger and more famous of the two brothers, was a master of naturalistic detail. He pays as much attention to earthly beauty as he does to the religious themes in the altarpiece. The folds of the clothes, the jewels, the fountain, the flowers and vegetation, the churches and landscape in the background – all reveal a systematic and discriminating study of the natural world.

Compare with the earlier, “flatter” International Gothic art of the 14th century. Although artists like Duccio and Simone Martini had begun to explore depth, perspective, and space, van Eyck takes it to a whole new level and we recognise, for the first time, an unquestionable realism in the finished artwork.

See here for the whole altarpiece and below that for a selection of some of the wonderful details.

 

 

Music

Dame Janet Baker performs Dido’s Lament, Glyndebourne (1966)

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Dido and Aeneas is a Baroque opera by English composer Henry Purcell, composed around 1688, and based on Book IV of the Aeneid, the Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the second decade BCE, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy to found a city and become the ancestor of the Romans.

Book IV recounts how his ship, en route from Epirus to Sicily, is blown off course and lands on the shores of Carthage in North Africa, where Aeneas falls in love with their queen, Dido, and she with him. However, Aeneas is reminded by the gods of his destiny and he must dutifully depart for Italy, leaving Dido in despair at her abandonment.

The opera culminates with its most famous aria, When I Am Laid In Earth, popularly known as Dido’s Lament, wherein Dido slowly dies of a broken heart.

Here, we will enjoy Dame Janet Baker performing the role of Dido at Glyndebourne in 1966. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest expositions of tragedy in modern operatic history. The lament is divided into two parts: the “recitative” which sets the scene, and the aria which follows and leads us to Dido’s death. Here we will cut to the aria. Dido’s sister, Belinda, her face radiating a deeply-felt empathy, springs forward to support Dido both morally and physically. Now watch Dido begin her lament. Here’s the libretto by Nahum Tate:

When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

The music is in G Minor, the ultimate key for expressing sadness and tragedy, and the bassline (passacaglia) repeats as if in waves of despair, descending, like Dido, toward the grave. Janet Baker has been quoted as saying: “if the Fates are with you, the magic will descend”; they must have been with her here: her manipulation of the vibrato and legato, her bearing, the genuine pathos – the scene is mesmerising.

With superb silent support from Sheila Armstrong as Belinda, Baker’s immersion in the role is absolute and all-consuming. Take a look at 1:49 and again at 1:56, at the end of the words “Remember me”, and note her head and throat momentarily sag with anguish. Her legs give way at 4:12 and the ladies-in-waiting, in unison, take a fearful step forward. The lament now descends chromatically, semitone by semitone, as Dido descends inch by inch, dead, to the ground.

The repeated phrase “Remember me” is wringing with sentiment; it is no surprise to find Purcell’s music to the lament used at Remembrance Day services around the country, to poignant effect.

Dame Janet Baker in Dido’s Lament
Music

The John Barry Seven, James Bond Theme (1962)

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It’s interesting that James Bond theme songs are remarkably recognisable as such. They share certain stylistic elements and motifs that clearly signal their association with the famous franchise, and it’s all thanks to the involvement of one son-of-York, John Barry, who was by far the biggest contributor to Bond scores and theme songs. Of all the Bond themes, the first and most famous – and the one then regularly used in subsequent films – is that written for Dr No in 1962. The original score was actually composed by Monty Norman (though this was disputed by John Barry) but most notably arranged and performed by John Barry and his orchestra.

The score was a masterpiece of expressive film music and established a clear template for the quintessential Bond theme: unnerving orchestral chords, raunchy brass, clashing cymbals and of course that zesty surf rock guitar played by Vic Flick. Flick played his famous riff on a 1939 Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe electric guitar plugged into a Fender Vibrolux amplifier. Its interplay with the orchestral instrumentation produced a thrilling soundtrack that managed to encompass and express the sinister world of the spy, just perfect for the new film. The song ends just as thrillingly on that single Em/maj9 chord so famous it’s known as the “James Bond chord”. If you’re a guitarist, you might find it fun to reproduce this final chord yourself…it’s this:

Barry went on to score ten more Bond films, but this original score is the one that everyone instantly recognises as the Bond theme. Here’s the version recorded for single release by the John Barry Seven, reaching number one on 1st November 1962.

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore perform Pete and Dud at the Zoo (1966)

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Monotonal cod philosopher Pete and deferential sidekick Dud deliver an archetypal dialogue in the reptile house at the zoo. This is one of the so-called “Dagenham dialogues”, featuring “Pete and Dud”, popularised on the show Not Only…But Also, first aired in 1965.

Coming out of the heady iconoclastic success of the satirical stage revue, Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore embarked on what was originally intended to be a solo project, Not Only Dudley Moore, But Also His Guests. However, having invited Peter Cook to appear with him in the pilot, the success of their double act quickly led to Cook joining the show permanently.

The dialogues between the flat-capped comedy creations from Dagenham presented Peter Cook with the opportunity to ad-lib and creatively explore the myriad comic possibilities of his character. His ability to sustain long periods of straight-faced comic ramblings that oftentimes bring Moore to the brink of corpsing hilarity, adds a wonderful comic tension to the dialogues. Ever alert to Moore’s struggle to stay in character, Cook enjoys ramping up the comic surreality in order to crack Dud up.

The duo’s relationship was always a bit edgy, but their partnership fell apart during the marathon tour of their two-man show Behind the Fridge, in the early seventies, and they never worked together on a regular basis again, save for some albums and shows featuring the less-than-edifying “Derek and Clive” characters. A flawed bromance they may have been but it’s preferable to remember the good times, and at times those good times were comedically sublime.

Cook and Moore
Film, TV, and Theatre

Kenneth Branagh’s St Crispin’s Day Speech, Shakespeare’s Henry V (1989)

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The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) was a series of wars between England and France involving England’s claim to the French throne. In the campaign of 1415, England’s Henry V sailed for France and besieged the fortress at Harfleur, capturing it in September. The English army then marched across the French countryside towards Calais, only to be intercepted by the French army near the village of Azincourt. Henry’s troops were exhausted, hungry, sick, demoralised, and pitiably outnumbered (according to some estimates, by some 36000 to 9000 troops).

It didn’t look good. Henry needed to rouse his men for battle like never before, and he gave them a speech which not only roused them, but spurred them to a victory that would resound throughout the ages as the famous Battle of Agincourt. It was the morning of October 25th (St Crispin’s Day).

That Henry’s speech occurred is agreed by historians to be a factual event. However, it was left to the creative imagination of William Shakespeare, two hundred years later, to envisage Henry’s words and compose the über-galvanising “St Crispin’s Day Speech” that has come down to us in his play, Henry V.

What a speech! If anything could get you up and off to face the French, it’s surely inspirational words such as these:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today who sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
…gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here
And hold their manhoods cheap…

Laurence Olivier famously delivered this call to arms in the 1944 film of the play, made as a morale-booster for the war effort. However, for me there is no better delivery than this mesmerising performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 1989 version. Watch this, and allow yourself to be fired up, but please resist the temptation to hit a Frenchman!

PS almost certainly apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless, is the claim that, in the real life speech, Henry V told his men that the French had boasted that they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every archer, so that he could never draw a longbow again. After the battle, English archers were showing French captives those fingers as if saying “See – my fingers are still here”. This is now known as the “V” for victory gesture!

Kenneth Branagh, Henry V
Literature

G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

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G K Chesterton is best known for his series of quirky stories about amateur sleuth and Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown. However, it is his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday which is for me his abiding masterpiece, a piece of literature I have returned to perhaps five or six times in order to recapture its delicious prose and otherworldliness. I even put this old and wonderfully designed book cover onto a T-shirt!

 

At first glance, The Man Who Was Thursday is a suspenseful mystery story, a thriller, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no mere detective story; little is as it seems in this mystery, and we find ourselves in deeper waters than expected. The novel’s subtitle offers us a clue to this: A Nightmare.

Gabriel Syme is a poet and a police detective; Lucien Gregory, a poet and bomb-throwing anarchist. At the beginning of the novel, Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and gets himself elected to it as “Thursday,” one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, in the sudden full knowledge of a hamstrung and petrified Gregory.

Syme soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and even as the masks come off, the biggest question – for both the reader and the characters – is who is Sunday? What is the true identity of the larger than life character who is the supreme head of the anarchists? The story unfolds thrillingly, and throughout it all we are treated to Chesterton’s exuberant prose, clever dialogue and gripping style. His wit shines through every scene.

Let’s read an example of this style, and how Chesterton constructs a creeping sense of jeopardy. Syme, the detective who is disguised as a poet, has engaged the anarchist Gregory and, on condition of having sworn himself to absolute secrecy, is taken to meet the highly dangerous anarchist council. Just prior to the arrival of the rest of the anarchists, Syme lets Gregory into his own secret…

“Gregory, I gave you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same kind?”

“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.

“Yes,” said Syme, very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to the anarchists?”

“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”

“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you swear?”

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said abruptly—

“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.

“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard.”

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.

“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear your friends coming.”

G K Chesterton
Music

Barbara Bonney sings Schubert’s Ave Maria (1994)

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A few years ago I was fortunate enough to hear Schubert’s Ave Maria being rehearsed for a forthcoming wedding in the glorious surroundings of Ripon Cathedral. The loftiness of the cathedral’s Gothic architecture provided a fitting acoustic resonance to showcase such a lofty piece of music.

Franz Schubert composed the piece in 1825, and actually it wasn’t technically an Ave Maria at all (an “Ave Maria” being music written specifically as a prayer to the Virgin Mary and for use in the liturgy) but was called Ellens dritter Gesang (Ellen’s Song), and was part of his Opus 52, a series of settings based on Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake. It didn’t take long, however, for the composition to develop into the “all-purpose” Catholic piece that’s so popular today (although many conservative Catholics won’t play it at weddings or funerals precisely because it’s non-liturgical).

Anyway, it is popular for good reason. It has a wonderfully lilting refrain and offers the right singer an excellent vehicle with which to approach sonic beauty. It’s been sung by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Beyoncé, but for real fulfilment of its potential, it calls out for a full, round and rich soprano voice. To that end, listen to this version by American soprano, Barbara Bonney. Less of a household name perhaps than Maria Callas, say, or Joan Sutherland, but nevertheless Barbara Bonney exhibits an immaculate artistry on this recording of Ave Maria.

Barbara Bonney

 

 

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